Friday, April 29, 2016

Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy with these 5 Psychotronic films on Hulu Plus

From fish god cults to a cockeyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD premake to maternal body horror so unseemly no one's dared try anything remotely like it in 30 years, these five psychotronic films predict the the new world orderless matriarchy of the Scorpio Sun / Pisces rising goddess Hulu-Ree Klinn-Tohn as handily as if they washed ashore with campaign bumper stickers in their rusty talons, and hammers to smash down the crosses from Middle America's fearful Christian churches.

My pick of Five Psychotronic Films on Amazon Prime for a new TRUMPMERICA post was such a hit I felt I had to balance the scale, so here it is. Evoking the coming liberal dystopia that can only result when a woman is or isn't elected president, yhere's less apocalypse and more matriarchy to worry about this time, and all in all a more inspiring future of liberal awareness, higher taxation of the rich, and massive un-deployment. With every new dead or symbolically neutered old white male voter we'll be sliding one step closer to socialism until we're so like Canada we'll forget we ever weren't.

PS - Dear Hulu: You should have a 'Resume' button - instead we have to start over every time we press stop and that's crap (at least on my Blu-ray player); also Hulu is a terrible name for a movie site. Don't try to seem playful! You've got enough dreary 50s-60s international art films on there to send even Ozu scrambling for the channel changer, and Hulu is a Hawaiian term, and some of us have never remembered to forget Pearl Harbor. So change yr name to FROGTOWN, and not just 'cuz there's so many insufferably French films on your site, but because you carry the one.. the only....

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN

(1988) Starring Sandahl Bergman, Roddy Piper

**1/2

The lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman, and pleasingly self-effacing wrestler Roddy Piper roam the post-nuclear wasteland on behalf of the man-hungry matriarchy looking for wild women to impregnate. War has left most men dead or sterile; Roddy's one of the few men still able to produce viable sperm --and man he looks it. As a 'no nonsense' health official in charge of helping him 'liberate'-- and then do his duty upon--a harem of fertile 'passives' currently held captive in a frog mutant warlord's stronghold, Bergman ably projects both sex and power, medical austerity, and sheer potent magnetism. Rodney's character is a bit on the broad side. Apparently--for some reason no sensible male in the audience will quite understand--Rodney is furious over his stud position, and keeps trying to escape. Bergman locks him into an explosive chastity belt that will shock his nuts if he tries to escape, so soon he stops trying and off they go into the wasteland, headed to the legendary Frogtown, a combination abandoned oil refinery and R-rated version of a STAR WARS cantina.

If your misogynist radar hadn't already gone off for the scene where Spangle (Bergman) abducts--and then drugs--a wild fertile woman of the wasteland and compels Hell to mount her, well, it will when she goes undercover as a bondage slave. Hell plays her abductor, their cover story being he's there to sell her into the harem of the Frog warlord. That said, your feminist higher power won't complain too much, since the women are for the most part super capable and assertive, more physically agile and gutsier than Hell, and though they drive in a pink 'Medtech' station wagon, there's a badass chick (Cec Verrell) on a .50 calibre sunroof mounted machine as his 'bodyguard.' In other words, rather than affirm male dominance, the film deconstructs sadomasochism, dominance, harem-keeping, reptilian sex slave mind games, and "dance! dance!" warlord cup-banging as pathetic attempts to reclaim the phallus from mighty Woman. Hell's junk is at the mercy of Spangle and he's expected to 'perform' while his two captors/guardian women watch with detached curiosity, ready to zap him at a moment's notice. In other words it's a satisfying inversion of the recent real life outrage with an all male government panel on women's sexual health. Here we have an all female team considering his phallus literally government property.

Such a thing might easily devolve into campy parody, but everyone involved here has the good sense to play it straight. Even that semi-twee title is no obscurantist whimsy but strictest present tense fact: Piper's character is named Hell, and Frogtown isoccupied by real frog mutants ("created as the by-product of your germ warfare") and the frog makeups/masks are pretty damned good for what's clearly a low budget endeavor. Bergman is still as gorgeous, sexily assured and Fosse dancer-lithe as she was six years earlier in Conan. Surprise, surprise, she's nowhere near ready for retirement, and one can't help but wince at all the parts that could have, should have had, and would have been written for her in a more perfect world. The big surprise though is Piper's ability to convey a surprisingly sweet and tender vulnerability in his softer scenes. Coming off a bit broad and flat when he's expected to play the sexist dingus, when he finally drops his guard, he becomes the most emotionally open character in the film! Who'd a thunk it?

The rest is hit and miss: a frog with a fez doing the Sidney Greenstreet schtick at the requisite strip club (the main set) is a little unbearable. But then there's Rory Calhoun, wearing his good store teeth, as a uranium miner. When he's dying with his elderly head in the laps of one of the young liberated pacifist concubines in the backseat as they're pursued by the frog warlord in his armored car in the big climax you realize suddenly - holy shit! Swap some genders and it prefigures Mad Max: Fury Road! Considering Frogtown is one of that slew of post-Road Warrior 80s apocalypse road trip movies, the influences come full circle!

Why Hillary: One look at the face of the odious frog king and you'll be reminded of a certain amphibious also-runner behind Trump. Sandahl is Hillary being sold to the Middle States ('can she dance?' asks the Frog Prince in he fez before voting/purchasing); his fertile harem are the women voters of swing states looking askance at the brutalizing Handmaid's Tale future awaiting them under The Frog mutant's sway even though they've been trained to submit (one grand dame frog lady takes a shine to Piper and frees him though it means her death -- she'd be the swing state independent female voting bloc). Scruffy Roddy stands for the American midwest, reckoning the pros and cons between giving a woman control of the nation's balls, or else letting power-hungry toads run riot over our civil liberties. Some choice.

THE BROOD

(1979) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2

If you need a map through this genuinely strange, disturbing picture then I'd say watch his subsequent film, SCANNERS first. SCANNERS is a zippy mind-expander with solid acting, exploding heads, Michael Ironside in his best role (his facial expressions when he's scanning are beyond brilliant) and--with a voice so deep it opens up a hole in the floor--Patrick McGoohan as a revolutionary pharmacologist. Here in BROOD-land it's still the 70s -and a little less Hitchcockian and more straight-up horrifying. Fewer drugs, more a highly controversial form of gestalt therapy called 'psychoplasmics,' a method of externalizing rage that causes he body to break out in spots... or cancerous tubers or worse. Oliver Reed is Dr. Raglan, the mastermind psychiatrist who runs the place. Wildly unhinged Samantha Eggar is his star patient. Raglan has her put her deep into regressive therapy and won't let his concerned husband see her. Their child, on the other hand, is brought in for weekends, but comes home traumatized and bruised. Yeeesh!

I don't want to spoil the thing, but there's a kind of post-feminist version of the Monster from the Id going on here, making this a bit like KRAMER VS. KRAMER VS. FRANKENSTEIN. The hairy actor in the beginning demonstration is the most disturbing part of the film for me. The scene where a cute possible love interest Ruth Mayer (Susan Hogan with a great 70s elfin hair cut) is hammered to death by two of the monster kids right in front of her horrified kindergarten class is the most outrageous and deeply disturbing scene in all of 70s horror. Dude, there's always SCANNERS. See that one instead!

PS - My new favorite stealth character actor: Robert A. Silverman (above). The Dick Miller to Cronenberg's Corman, he's great as a less hirsute previous patient of the clinic preparing a lawsuit, wearing a white towel on his neck to cover an awful mutating psychoplasmic affliction, he's so good in BROOD and as Hans in NAKED LUNCH (above), and the artist in SCANNERS well, he just knocks all Cronenberg's films up a notch. Why only Cronenberg seems to know of his genius is beyond me. Toronto experimental theater's gain is the cinematic world's loss?

Why Hillary: It is foretold in ancient texts: amok liberalism ushered in by a woman prez shall lead to the return of the 70s encounter group /EST craze. The nuclear family unit will be broken apart by charlatan shrinks who won't let the husband have control over his own wife. Though it's a Canadian horror movie, you can argue that the human body itself is America: "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me," notes Silverman, "and it did." Asking why he's suing when he can't possibly prove Raglan's methods gave him cancer, he says he's doing it for revenge! So people will know from the press that "psychoplasmics cause cancer." -i.e., global warming. The Brood are the protestors disrupting Trump rallies. As with the Trump supporters themselves, it's not important whether or not the orange one is a genuine threat, it's enough that they get angry thinking about it, and the anger justifies the reprisal. Imagine if all the rage spewed on internet comment sections was able to manifest itself?

We'd all be hammered.

DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

(1994) Dir. Linda Hassani

****

Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither whimsical nor grungy), this Satanic daughter love story is like THE LITTLE MERMAID x SPECIES with a refreshing lack of qualms about killing. The story begins in Hell: there's Old Testament-style marching lines of desert laborers (ala STARGATE x PHANTASM) head to their fates, guided by pumping ominous but giddy Fuzzbee Morse liturgical score. Angela Featherstone is the young, wistful demoness Veronica who dreams of seeing the surface of Earth, though it is forbidden by her abusive sputtering over-acting demon father (Nicholas Worth, the "psycho's psycho" in DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE 14 years earlier). Once she sneaks away and moves above ground, she tears the spines and hearts out of rapists and racist cops and feeds their hearts to her dog Hellraiser. Shacking up with a handsome sweet-souled doctor named Max (Daniel Markel), she wanders by night (while he's on ER duty) to kill sinners, and if any homicide detective tries to get in her way, she just shows him the hellfire behind her glowing eyes while making dire announcements about the grim future that awaits mankind. That's enough to keep him from digging any deeper.

Like some Satanic bible school instructional video, this might not be for all tastes, but I dig the dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality and incongruity of set and setting (everyone speaks English but it's clearly shot in gorgeous old unbombed Romania). A Guy Maddin meets Val Lewton in Ed Wood's basement kind mythopoetic aesthetic suffuses everything in a red glow. Maybe Featherstone isn't the greatest actor in the world but what she lacks anyone can learn; what she has--the ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time--is unteachable. Her flatline reading of "I've always wanted to witness people coupling, Max, but I never thought it would move me so much," is so spot-on you realize better (or worse) actresses would never be able to match it --they'd either try and be sexy (and come off campy), imperious (and come off bitchy), mean (and come off sour) or tough (and come off laughable and/or closeted), but Featherstone's assertive confidence and deadpan demeanor is so despite-itself sexy she gets away with murder. "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max" she says, and when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm, it's not goofy despite the fakeness, but because of it somehow very reassuring, as is her matter of fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed Hellraiser. I've only ever seen that level of skill at showing women commanding both adoration and respect in in German science fiction film female characters from the 70s (as in STAR MAIDENS in the west, ELEOMA and IM STAUB DER STERNE east. Why there wasn't a sequel (judging from the double title more than one was planned) I don't know, unless of course it's the damn patriarchy. Matthew Bright (FREEWAY) did the script. A woman named Linda Hassani directed. I've seen it ten times.

Why Hillary:One of Veronica's first assignments down in Hell is to come up with creative ways to punish the lawyers and bankers, mirroring Hillary's promise to clean up Wall Street. When Veronica kills two racist cops after they beat up on a black guy she mirrors Clinton's drawing cop protests for her support of Black Lives Matter. Predictions of a hellfire future for sinners mirrors Hill's certainty global warming will haunt the future of big oil consumers. Also, Veronica tells a nun "she cannot enter a church" as she "would surely combust' --that's so Hillary!

DEMONS

(1985) Dir. Lamberto Bava **1/2

In the land of Trump it's all about the thermonuclear family, be it ever so "humbly" nouveau-riche. From the giddy era when louche swinging was the norm instead-- the 80s--comes this Italian film, shot in Berlin, which sums up life after both nations had to surrender to the Allies in WWII a mere 40 years earlier. It's the story of a demonic theater showing a film about a silver mask triggering a demon outbreak, with a promotional display mask in the lobby that actually causes a demon outbreak when one girl tries it on as a lark and it pricks her skin. The result are demons with green food coloring dripping out of their mouths and sores, running around in the theater ala MONSTERS CRASH PAJAMA PARTY.

If you saw DEMONS in the same theater as the characters seeing the movie in the film, with the same actors all in the theater (as might be at the premiere) then I can imagine this might freeze your hard drive with meta refraction. Just ask the Axis, or the folks at the advance screening midnight show of DARK KNIGHT RISES in Aurora, Colorado. Produced and co-written by Dario Argento, asst. director Michele Soavi (STAGEFRIGHT), featuring sublime boom operation by Angelo Amatulli (SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS), and music from Claudio 'Goblin' Simonetti (ZOMBI 2), it's like an Argento-Goblin-Bava Jr. family affair, by which I mean nowhere near as good as 70s Argento but nowhere near as bad as 00's Argento, and still nowhere near as meta as the best Soavi.

Thus we learn that genius is fleeting --even in the best of us.

Michele Soavi - showing his good side

Lamberto Bava, though bless him, never was/is a genius, nor even a terribly decent director. I don't envy having the pressure of such an iconic father to measure up to, but the kid has no talent for either blocking, pacing, or storytelling. What he does have are the brilliant red and blue lighting Argento used in SUSPIRIA and INFERNO and art direction that's quintessentially Italian (even if set in Berlin) and a gaggle of instantly dated rock songs from Billy Idol, Rick Springfield, and Mötley Crüe to add just the right note of 80s 8th grade 8-ball of crank snorting dirtbag shop class idiocy to the proceedings. Soavi himself plays an elusive robot with either his human mask half-gone or human with half his robot mask gone; a carload of coked-up punks snort their coke in a Coke cup ("hilarious"); a deux ex machina helicopter drops through the ceiling; the movie keeps going past the credits. Little random details like those are what gets us through the stock footage of Berlin nightlife so we can at last reach the edifying sight of the final couple on a motorbike riding up and down the aisles killing demons with a samurai sword while 80s hair metal blasts and you realize hey, don't settle for walking.

As the action occurs in a theater mimicking the film onscreen about a demon outbreak tied to a demonic mask (a signifier to papa Mario's first horror film THE MASK OF SATAN), there are also a few priceless and ingenious meta moments that make it more than just dumb dirtbag fun, but something nearly Antonioni-esque, as when the first victim in the film-within-the-film and the first killing offscreen match up in their anguished noises, and a giant close up of a flashing blade on screen seems to be cutting the (normal size relative to the audience) dying girl's head off. But once the film runs out, and everyone realizes they're trapped, that kind of meta weirdness fades in favor of typical demon attacks. Flat close-ups of green food coloring raining out of grinning fangs and pustules of the newly infected seem to go on way too long (Lamberto loves him some pustules).

Most importantly, thanks to Hulu, now you can watch it on your phone where the screen is too small for any demon to climb through.

WARUM DIE HILL? Any difference between the slavering demonic horde, the coked-up 'gang' driving through the Berlin B-roll, and the dwindling 'good' audience members gradually dissipates into meaningless chaos --and a black woman starts it all off by insisting on trying on the mask in the lobby (cuz black ladies always be tryin' on strange display masks, am I right fellas?). I could eke a racist-feminist-sociopolitical metaphor out of all that but I shan't... or can't, for within the heart of that metaphor lurks a zone where caution and lethargy meet. Assigned Pandora's box-opening duty, a group of men might decide to just say they already looked and it was empty. But a woman always has to look, has to try the mask, and the pustules come. Filmed in Germany, that land where a single demonic prick started an outbreak of inhuman violence, it's waiting for just the right moment to swell and burst anew upon the acne-scarred facial landscape.

DAGON

(2001) Dir. Stuart Gordon

***1/2

We of the Lovecraft cult (if you'll forgive the expression) have become quite used to being disappointed by big screen adaptions. The pantheon of his elder Gods like Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and their hideous half-human offspring--all summonable via the unholy bible of black magic, the Necronomicon--reverberate far deeper than ordinary mind's eye boogeymen, in other words no 2D or 3D representation can compare. Seeming to cohere out of the electric blur behind our eyelids, they urge us forward through Lovecraft's prose as if his writing had its own dark Necronomicon-ish power, so that just reading it by ourselves, not even moving our lips, we feel the behemoths stir from their slumber in the timeless ocean below our archaic collective unconsciousness. Naturally no film is going to be able to capture that feeling. Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS was about that feeling, but didn't create it. Corman made a decent stab at it, but the results weren't quite up to his Poe stuff. Luckily there's Stuart Gordon, who did FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR, the two best Lovecraft adaptations, and who keeps the events and tentacles flowing in something like real time, over a single night or weekend of rattletrap madness, so there's seldom time to get or need a 'third eye' complete picture. Seeing protagonists being chased along progressively more surreal avenues while just trying to get help for his drowning friend is enough to keep us engaged, and that's just what the stories are like, snapshots of Hell barely developed before they're burning.

For DAGON, Gordon adapts Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth" moving the locale from New England to an ancient Spanish fishing village, and having the action go down over one long rainy afternoon into late rainy evening, capturing the strange disorienting nightmare of trying to procure help after a freak storm rolls in over a passing yacht occupied by American investment wizard Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden), his Spanish girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Meroño), his Aussie boss and boss's wife. With the boss trapped under the onrushing flood of water from the hull. Paul and Barbara rush ashore to get help, are immediately separated by a seemingly friendly priest and, well, the weirdness never lets up for a moment, nor does the rain.

As a fan of the original story, I balked at first, but substituting Spain for New England is a surprising but effective touch as the language barrier adds a nice gateway frisson. In the terror and confusion of panic in a weird town, the locals may very well start to resemble fish monsters even in the best of circumstances.

All in all, DAGON comes as close as any adaptation yet as far as capturing the eerie mood of the fish god cult mythos, and the feeling that some wild recurring dream is coming true, that the area filling between these nightmare wafers is a wet (literally) dream, the sort of nightmare magic that happens when the dreaming male's conscious ego meets the mermaid-esque unconscious anima (Macarena Gómez) and it's as if time stands still and you 'wake up' from reality. The truth of the dream and the moment stretches across all time and space, the world around you vanishes, and the dichotomies of dreams and waking, past and future, real and surreal, are momentarily--maybe permanently, fatally--transcended: childhood and adulthood, life and death, male and female, mammal and cephalopod...

Wait what was that last one? Kiss me, baby, and never mind.

POR QUE HILÁRAYE K'LIHN-TOÑ: An evil fish god cult priest incites the elders to smash the iconography of the Christian church. The locals kill a Rupert Murdoch-esque yachtsman (offscreen). The ending suggests the future depends on the Democratic Party's ability to adapt triumphing over the Republican's resistance to change. As with the other films on this list it's ultimately about a sort of high Precambrian matriarchy. The plethora of Spanish speakers stands as a mockery to the the anti-immigrant Trump supporters who consider it a violation of their civil rights if you try to explain the difference between Spain and Mexico.

+ 5 RUNNERS UP:

SHIVERS

(1975) Dir. David Cronenberg

***

I disgust la SHIV in an oilier post but fack it. Spiked with livid, funny gross outs, a red kidney thing hopping inside any old orifice, the film's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. Ask yourself: is this how the red states really think we behave up here in the blue beyond? Or is it just how they would, were they not good decent Christians? Either way, you may never want to have sex again --and on behalf of our stressed planet, thank you for that. Shot as grungy as a 16mm instructional film, it really should be shown in every high school health class, for it would chasten the louchest Hefner. The performances are deceptively brilliant; the moments of freeze frame slow motion unique and effective; the scenes of orgies breaking out in the halls and stairwells remind me of drug parties I've... heard about... on Fox News. Just thinking about Fox News in fact should answer your question why this film is 'Hillary-esque'! After it's over, you'll be grateful for all the repression that makes social order of any sort possible.

Hah -- thanks Joel and Michael - I WISH I was part of the mainstream corporate media agenda, if so I'd definitely have done one for Bernie, and may still. It's not as 'fun' to imagine a sane rational future for America, film-wise, as it is to imagine the fusion of fascist rabble and amok capitalism of Trump or the coming of a wise but secretly ruthless Matriarchy, more or less. In fact I don't think there's ever even BEEN a sane rational future in the movies!

We're here to "save" you

The Acidemic Film Journal of Film and Media

Cleansing the doors of cinematic perception via a fusion of academic, critical, historical, and gonzo-journalistic "style," Acidemic delves deep down into pre-code canyons, then rises up on noir paranoia wings, across the giant insects of the Atomic plains, to explode into paisley rain under the Haight-Ashbury 60s, the EST-opened 70s, and into the incoherent post-liberated Now. Get ready. Get set, and get setting.

Mission Statement

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piercing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."- H.P Lovecraft